Domus ecclesiae and domus dei: The orientated church building

Abstract

The domus ecclesia, the “house of the Church”, has its origins in the clandestine domestic meetings of the primitive church. If we understand the Greek term ekklesia as the “convened assembly”, the church building becomes the house where the assembly meet. It finds a parallel with the Jewish synagogue, but its equivalence is to be found in that other sacred Hebrew building, the Temple in Jerusalem; throughout its historical development and existence the church building was conceived as the domus Dei, the “house of God”. (Hani, 1983: 22-23; Ratzinger, 2006:53-57)

Within the liturgical movement that preceded the Second Vatican Council reform (1962-65), note should be taken of the experiences developed by Romano Guardini with groups from the German Catholic “Quickborn” youth movement in the 1920s and 30s. Guardini’s experiments with the architect Rudolf Schwarz in the Hall of Armed Knights of Rothenfels Castle (1928) bear witness to the flourishing of a new architectural-liturgical awareness, placing emphasis on the assembly or congregation itself, proposing a living participation by the ecclesiastic community, the Corpus Christi mysticum.